Posts Tagged HITECH

We’re always looking for new ways to illustrate the power and versatility of our GoAnywhere suite of secure file transfer and encryption solutions. Very simply, GoAnywhere helps you streamline, encrypt and automate your file transfer processes to save time and money while meeting ever-growing compliance requirements.

Still, we find it’s sometimes challenging to quickly explain the power and convenience of our managed file transfer software, so we’re excited to introduce somebrand new videos to showcase the flexibility and control GoAnywhere clients have.

With support for virtually any platform and protocol, including FTP, FTPS, SFTP, HTTP/S, AS2, SMTP and ZIP, GoAnywhere puts local control of the entire process into one intuitive dashboard. GoAnywhere eliminates the need for custom scripts, generates detailedaudit logs, and provides a rich catalog of features for comprehensive management, all without additional hardware or specialized skills.

Susan is the Marketing Manager at Linoma Software, helping promote our secure file transfer and encryption solutions. Her specialty is content creation and social media marketing, and you can find out more about her by viewing her LinkedIn profile.

A requirement that companies that maintain personal data establish and implement internal policies to protect data privacy and security; and

A requirement that the government ensure sensitive data is protected when the government hires third-party contractors.

This act would also require, under threat of fine or imprisonment, that businesses and agencies notify affected individuals of a security breach by mail, telephone or email “without unreasonable delay.” Media notices would be required for breaches involving 5,000 or more people. The FBI and the Secret Service would need to be notified if the breach affects 10,000 or more people, compromises databases containing the information of one million or more people, or impacts federal databases or law enforcement.

But that’s not the only security bill that has businesses concerned.

In the House, Rep. Mary Bono Mack (R-Ca) is holding hearings in preparation of a bill she’s named The SAFE (Secure and Fortify) Data Act that would also require “reasonable security policies and procedures” to protect consumers and enable disclosures to victims and the Federal Trade Commission within 48 hours of a data breach.

Companies no longer viewed as the victims

All this sounds good from the consumer’s point of view. But what about the expense – and potential penalties – suffered by the “owners” of the data: the businesses themselves?

While these bills may address the public’s interest for notification — and indeed they would bring some semblance of a national standard – they also represent an interesting shift in the liabilities that companies will face. How is that?

Though we currently have no federal data breach notification law, federal policies now view the companies that experience a data breach as the victims of crime. However, under the proposed legislative bills, companies that do not act quickly to appropriately secure the personal data of customers – or fail to report a data breach in a reasonable amount of time – would not only suffer the theft of data, but also be held liable for its loss.

This is a significant shift. Companies are now being viewed not as the owners of consumer data, but merely guardians and trustees whose job it is to protect that data or face criminal penalties. And the message is clear: if companies won’t take adequate precautions to secure the sensitive data of our customers, they’ll pay a hefty price.

Where does your company stand?

In a world in which diligent hackers have the power break into seemingly secure networks and systems, what can your company do?

The challenge is first to determine exactly what qualifies as adequate precautions.

A review of the HIPAA HITECH security provisions that took effect last year provides some insight about what the government considers adequate protection.

HITECH strongly recommends the use of encryption technology. Encryption is a good place for your company to start, especially when dealing with the data your company stores on its servers. If sensitive data itself is kept securely encrypted, a data breach doesn’t expose the content of the information itself.

Secure managed file transfer protocols – which send data using encryption – is the second place to focus attention.

If data is encrypted when it is being securely transmitted between business partners, the value of that data should it be breached – through hacking, theft, or other malicious actions – is worthless. Encryption and secure managed file transfers can dramatically minimize the holes of technical breaches, significantly reducing an organization’s liability.

Preventing exposure

The Citigroup data breach has rekindled the momentum for a nationwide, cross-industry data breach reporting standard. This standard will not to eliminate the physical breaches themselves. What’s needed is legislation to encourage companies secure the underlying data that is the target of the hackers.

Isn’t it time for your company to take a serious look at its liabilities and to investigate how encryption and managed file transfers can close these important security holes?

Thomas M. Stockwell is one of Linoma Software's subject matter experts and a top blogger in the industry. He is Principle Analyst at IT Incendiary, with more than 20 years of experience in IT as a Systems Analyst, Engineer, and IS Director.

Managed File Transfer (MFT) systems are great for policy enforcement, access authentication, risk reduction, and more. But for HIPAA and HITECH requirements, MFT shines as a work-flow automation tool.

MFT as the B2B Enabler

It shines because Managed File Transfer systems are actually automation platforms that can help companies streamline the secure transfer of data between business partners. How? It removes many of the configuration steps traditionally required for complex Business-to-Business (B2B) processes, keeping it straightforward and manageable.

Transferring patient information is a difficult challenge which many healthcare institutions are facing. Data standards were supposed to simplify this communication between healthcare institutions and their partners. But ask any technical professional about the underlying variability of data formats, and you’ll hear a tale of potential confusion and complexity.

Nightmares of Compliance

The HITECH regulations within HIPAA require the security and privacy of healthcare records, strongly suggesting the use of data encryption. These records may travel between various healthcare-related partners including hospitals, clinics, payment processors and insurers. Each partner may require their own unique data format, and each may prefer a different encryption technique or transport protocol.

Considering these differing requirements, adding each new trading partner has traditionally needed the attention of in-house programming or manual processes, which has become hugely inefficient. Furthermore, if the new trading partner is not implemented properly, this can also create the potential for errors that may lead to data exposures. Any exposures could move the healthcare institution out of HIPAA/HITECH compliance and may cost them severely.

Simplifying and Integrating Information Transfer

A Managed File Transfer (MFT) solution can significantly reduce the potential for errors and automate those processes. With a good MFT solution, any authorized personnel should be able to quickly build transfer configurations for each healthcare business partner. This should allow for quick selection of strong encryption methods (e.g. Open PGP, SFTP, FTPS, HTTPS) based on the partner’s requirements, so that HITECH requirements are maintained. At the same time, a MFT solution creates a visible audit trail to ensure that compliance is sustained.

But, perhaps just as important, a good Managed File Transfer solution is constructed as a modulartool that can be easily integrated into existing software suites and workflow processes. In fact, a good MFT is like a plug-able transfer platform that brings the variability of all kinds of B2B communications under real management.

Now extend the MFT concept beyond the healthcare business sector, into manufacturing, finance, distribution, etc. Suddenly MFT isn’t a niche’ utility, but a productivity and automation tool that has myriad uses in multiple B2B environments.

A Day-to-day Technical Solution

Perhaps this is why the Gartner Group has identified Managed File Transfer as one of the key technologies that will propel businesses in the coming years. It’s more than just a utility suite: It’s a system that can be utilized over and over as an integral part of an organization’s solutions to automate and secure B2B relationships. In other words, MFT isn’t just for specialized compliance requirements, but a lynch-pin of efficient B2B communications technology that can bring real cost savings to every organization.

Thomas M. Stockwell is one of Linoma Software's subject matter experts and a top blogger in the industry. He is Principle Analyst at IT Incendiary, with more than 20 years of experience in IT as a Systems Analyst, Engineer, and IS Director.

Patient Privacy in Jeopardy

How important is a patient’s privacy? If your organization is a health care facility, the instinctive answer that comes to mind is “Very important!” After all, a patient’s privacy is the basis upon which the doctor/patient relationship is based. Right?

But the real answer, when it comes to patient data, may surprise you. According to a study released by the Ponemon Institute, “patient data is being unknowingly exposed until the patients themselves detect the breach.”

The independent study, entitled “Benchmark Study on Patient Privacy and Data Security” published in November of 2010examined the privacy and data protection policies of 65 health care organizations, in accordance with the mandated Health Information Technology for Economic and Clinical Health (HITECH) Act of 2009. HITECH requires health care providers to provide stronger safeguards for patient data and to notify patients when their information has been breached.

Patient Data Protection Not a Priority?

According to the study, seventy percent of hospitals say that protecting patient data is not a top priority. Most at risk is billing information and medical records which are not being protected. More significantly, there is little or no oversight of the data itself, as patients are the first to detect breaches and end up notifying the health care facility themselves.

The study reports that most health care organizations do not have the staff or the technology to adequately protect their patients’ information. The majority (67 percent) say that they have fewer than two staff members dedicated to data protection management.

And perhaps because of this lack of resources, sixty percent of organizations in the study had more than two data breaches in the past two years, at a cost of almost $2M per organization. The estimated cost per year to our health care systems is over $6B.

This begs the question: Why?

HITECH Rules Fail to Ensure Protection

HITECH encourages health care organizations to move to Electronic Health Records (EHR) systems to help better secure patient data. And, indeed, the majority of those organizations in the studies (89 percent) said they have either fully implemented or planned soon to fully implement EHR. Yet the HITECH regulations to date do not seem to have diminished security breaches at all, and the Ponemon Institute’s study provides a sobering evaluation:

Despite the intent of these rules (HITECH), the majority (71 percent) of respondents do not believe these new federal regulations have significantly changed the management practices of patient records.

Unintentional Actions – The Primary Cause of Breaches

According to the report, the primary causes of data loss or theft were unintentional employee action (52 percent), lost or stolen computing device (41 percent) and third-party mistakes (34 percent).

Indeed, it would seem that – with the use of EHR systems – technologies should be deployed to assist in these unintentional breaches. And while 85 percent believe they do comply with the loose legal privacy requirements of HIPAA, only 10 percent are confident that they are able to protect patient information when used by outsourcers and cloud computing providers. More significantly, only 23 percent of respondents believed they were capable of curtailing physical access to data storage devices and severs.

The study lists 20 commonly used technology methodologies encouraged by HITECH and deployed by these institutions, including firewalls, intrusion prevention systems, monitoring systems, and encryption. The confidence these institutions feel in these technologies are also listed. Firewalls are the top choice for both data breach prevention and compliance with HIPAA. Also popular for accomplishing both are access governance systems and privileged user management. Respondents favor anti-virus and anti-malware for data breach prevention and for compliance with HIPAA they favor encryption for data at rest.

The Value of Encryption

The study points to the value of encryption technologies – for both compliance purposes and for the prevention of unintended disclosure – and this value is perceived as particularly high by those who participated in the study: 72 percent see it as a necessary technology for compliance, even though only 60 percent are currently deploying it for data breach prevention. These identified needs for encryption falls just behind the use of firewalls (78 percent), and the requirements of access governance (73 percent).

Encryption for data-at-rest is one of the key technologies that HITECH specifically identifies: An encrypted file can not be accidentally examined without the appropriate credentials. In addition, some encryption packages, such as Linoma’s Crypto Complete, monitor and record when and by whom data has been examined. These safeguards permit IT security to audit the use of data to ensure that – should a intrusion breach occur – the scope and seriousness of the breach can be assessed quickly and confidently.

So how important is a patient’s privacy? We believe it’s vitally important. And this report from the Ponemon Institute should make good reading to help your organization come to terms with the growing epidemic of security breaches.

Thomas M. Stockwell is one of Linoma Software's subject matter experts and a top blogger in the industry. He is Principle Analyst at IT Incendiary, with more than 20 years of experience in IT as a Systems Analyst, Engineer, and IS Director.